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A human in the loop in surgery automation

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 3, pages 368–369 (2021)Cite this article

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To the Editor — Medical robots are expected to improve healthcare delivery and reduce costs. Robots are devoid of human shortcomings such as fatigue or momentary attention lapses, and can enhance practitioners’ capabilities in performing tasks, including surgeries. As robots’ perception, decision-making and autonomy increase, the role of humans will change, even decrease, and other issues relating to cybersecurity and privacy will become more significant1. The complex interplay between increasingly autonomous surgical robots, medical practitioners and support staff will soon complicate the understanding of how to allocate responsibility if something goes wrong. In this Correspondence, we argue that while the role of human performance in medical robot surgeries may decrease as robotic technology increases, the role of human oversight will increase.

Levels of automation define the robot’s progressive ability to perform particular functions independently. Yang et al. proposed a generic six-layered model for medical robots’ autonomy levels depicting a spectrum ranging from no autonomy (level 0) to full autonomy (level 5) to bridge this gap1. The effort is a step towards clarity, but the model needs detailing on how it applies to specific types of medical robots. Medical robots’ embodiment and capabilities differ vastly across surgical, physically/socially assistive or serviceable contexts, and the involved human–robot interaction is also distinctive2. Socially assistive robots, for instance, interact with users socially, performing a task for the user, but physical contact with the user is minimal. In contrast, physically assistive robots (for example, lower-limb exoskeletons), work towards a seamless integration with the user’s movement, and surgical robots are collaborative robots that extend the surgeon’s abilities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. eLaw Center for Law and Digital Technologies, Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands

    Eduard Fosch-Villaronga, Pranav Khanna, Hadassah Drukarch & Bart H. M. Custers

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  1. Eduard Fosch-Villaronga
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  2. Pranav Khanna
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  3. Hadassah Drukarch
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  4. Bart H. M. Custers
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Correspondence to Eduard Fosch-Villaronga.

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Fosch-Villaronga, E., Khanna, P., Drukarch, H. et al. A human in the loop in surgery automation. Nat Mach Intell 3, 368–369 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00349-4

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